Knowing where we’ve been splits the future wide open

Story by Andrew Griffin
with files from Kim Fullerton

Queer artists, both new and established, are becoming increasingly confident about drawing on their own personal experience for inspiration and demanding that the resulting work be considered as “universal” as Het art.

Queer art, however, remains a mystery to many straight people, be they other artists, critics or the general viewing public. For example, It seems some straight chicks—feminist, post-feminist or whatever—just hate being called girls, and grrrls, just drives them crazier.

Donna Lypchuk’s blast from the inebriated past in a recent Eye magazine diatribe on Game Girls, an exhibition of new media works at Toronto’s InterAccess this fall, is classic: “I guess the curator of Game Girls used ‘girls’ in a hip, slightly pejorative sense that implies that women are immature; after all, who’s going to go see a show that asks, ‘What games do women play?’ Because adult women don’t play games — they’re too busy limping around on toes stubbed bloody from trying to kick the pedestal out from beneath 10,000 years of patriarchal oppression.”

If Lypchuk had written this in 1978 I’d ignore her. Did she drowse through the past two decades of liberation strategies by feminist and gay artists? These strategies included the appropriation of language and image, gender parody and camp, full blown irony (in the case of post-liberationists and post-colonialists) and the burgeoning practice of quotation and sampling in art and popular culture. Did the spin happen too fast for her?

But more to the point, Game Girls was a riff on the electronic game culture of computers and Nintendo GameBoy.

Gay men and lesbians have created a culture full of language, art, film, fashion, music and theatre that simply eludes most straight people. When dykes call themselves and each other girls, it has its own inflected meaning. Just as the words girlfriend, sister and Miss Thing have for fags.

Ottawa painter Sherry Garcia called her most recent exhibition That’s Mr. Baby To You after a song by Kaia. Only later did she realize there was a tee shirt popular among gay men that said, “That’s Mr. Faggot to you.”

The parallel development of gay and lesbian aesthetics and the convergence of popular and fine arts are the hallmarks of queer art. As an emerging artist in the third wave, Garcia assumes these developments to be her birthright.

“I don’t do paintings to talk about political issues,” she says. “I paint to make pretty pictures and express personal feelings. I’m not trying to educate anyone. For me being queer is part of my art. The people who are in my paintings end up being queer people, women, because that’s who I know.”

A number of gay and lesbian artists have been making art since the dawn of homo time (that’s the 1970s and ’ 80s, for you pups). Now approaching their 40s and 50s, they are feeding on nearly 30 years of out queer art. Their current work indicates a future still outrageous enough to be called queer and witty enough to be beyond the pale of our straighter cousins.

Gay and lesbian artists have always drawn—and continue to draw—on the popular culture around them. TV, film, fashion, pornography are rifled as source material for dissection and reinvention. Artists also sample from art history, other artists and other cultures. While many younger queer artists are cycling through the liberating vagaries of abstract painting and experimental film, others continue to use narrative or documentary structures. Exploring and sampling from old formal structures and concerns are giving rise to new hybrid ones. There is still the earnest and in-your-face art that surely has a place somewhere. But the really interesting works that get talked about and have lasting power, embody complex, subtle positioning that undermine attempts to square peg them. They draw on words, images, style and narratives that come out of gay lives, but also out of the myriad cultural influences around them. Whatever our evolving strategies, the goal seems to be an age-old desire to write/right history, to tell our own stories and invent our own images.

Historical revisionism through a gay or lesbian lens continues in many artists’ works. A recent example that got the attention of Toronto audiences was Nina Levitt’s exhibition Gravity/Duet at Gallery TPW. Over the past 10 years, Levitt has moved from photo-based works to film and video projections that attempt to locate or invent hidden lesbian lives in history. In her most recent work, archival film images of women dancing together, astronauts and tumbling divers were raided from popular culture sources. And in an audio and projection work, the histories of cross-dressing women — such as Brandon Teena — were recounted.

Like Levitt, Carl Stewart is concerned about recovering the traces of personal history in his project Fragments from a Discarded Civilization, on view until Feb 8 in the Heritage Building exhibition space at Regional Headquarters; see Out In The City for details. For over three years Stewart has been collecting pieces of fabric from mattresses left on the street for disposal. He takes these swatches–often stained with semen, sweat, blood, excrement and/or urine and turns them into beautiful quilts lovingly ornamented with needlework, beads, sequins and fabric paint. The intimate traces of personal history are recovered, revised, glorified and elevated into public view, for Stewart, the more personal the better.

“As long as artists continue to produce work that in anyway reflects their own lives, their own lived experience, there will be queer art,” he says. “The more personal and local you are, the more universal your art becomes. The biggest obstacle will be the attitude expressed by many queer artists: I’m not a queer artist, I’m an artist who just happens to be queer.”

Photographer Louis Joncas’ camera is aimed at even subtler traces of queer existence. His photographs of gay male cruising areas – be they the meat packing district in New York city or the now clear-cut bushes of Ottawa’s Remic Rapids–are attempts to photograph unseen or absent presences.

Other artists, like Colin Campbell, mine their own artistic output. In Deja Vu, a videotape made in 1999, Campbell plays the parts of three sisters, characters drawn from various videos the artist has made over the past 25 years. The Woman from Malibu, Robin, and Colleena are all manifestations of Campbell’s alter-female-ego, re-configured in a non-linear, disorienting fashion. Playfully, the conversations between the three sisters leave us to wonder what was real or imagined, fact or invention. Deja Vu reveals concerns with time, history and aging in its intertwining of past and present. Campbell’s re-alignment of the stars, his art stock-taking, maps out where we’ve been and where we’ve arrived... and it points out possibilities for the future.

Invention and play are the strong cards of Margaret Moores, another video artist who has been working for a couple of decades. Teaming up with Almerinda Travassos in 1999 to make Dog Days, she re-visits the pleasures of sex in the outdoors and the gaucheries of lesbian fashion. Inspired by real letters found in a farmhouse under renovation, Moores conjures a story of secret identity, “scandal and suffering at the turn of the [19th] century.” “Some things never change, “ says Spike (played by Dierdre Logue) and who makes magic carpet riding a mouth watering sport.

Whether it is Donnna Quinces’ recasting of Charlie’s Angels as a stop-motion/lesbian-Barbie epic in Charlene’s Angels or Carl Stewart’s setting of a romantic comedy-musical completely within the confines of a public toilet in The Toilet Suite, queer video excels at playful re-interpretation of pop culture.

That’s why seeing gay and lesbian lives portrayed on TV or in Hollywood film—well or poorly—is not problematic. In fact, it’s a good thing. The mainstream is just one current in the cultural mayhem and it is not eating us up like little Pac-men running amok. If anything, it sustains a very strong current in queer art and video. Which brings us back to the point about straight cultural commentary missing the mark.

Consider Louis Joncas’ piece Reliquary. This time the unseen presences Joncas was dealing with were HIV and the chemicals used to combat it. From a distance it looked like a colourful mosaic. Upon closer inspection the viewer realized that it was an actual vial of blood surrounded by a sea of pills. The card informed us that the blood was from a HIV+ person. The mainstream press’ reaction was to call the Public Health Inspector to see if the artwork was a danger to the well being of gallery-goers, thereby proving that the real danger to art lovers is ignorant journalists. Reliquary is queer art at its most challenging and Ottawa is in for another does of it when Bruce LaBruce’s Skin Flicks is screened here in March.

As with his Honcho magazine spreads, La Bruce was invited to create an intervention in the mass media industry of gay porn. He quotes from its palate of humiliation, S&M, eroticized fascism, class difference, racism and more. Whether he’s simply replicating it or actually putting a radical spin on it, is up for hot debate, but LaBruce does manage to do some interesting and calculated things. A cherubic young man reads sincere poems citing shit and piss as his lovers’ gifts. The skinheads are not as romanticized as those Attila Richard Lukacs’ paints, but they’re portrayed in much the same way: existing and doing what they do in real life. Characters that mock middle-class fags as dull and cloned are just as dull and cloned. Finally, there is LaBruce’s creation of Cameltoe, the film’s female character. Cameltoe is such a great piece of hard-ass girl, that he simply must serialize her and sell it to CTV.

Did someone say the future of gay art is now?

Last Edited 10/06/04 ©2000 Pink Triangle Press